A political analyst, representing the views of Indian elite, calls this a new triad of India 's political economy,

and adds, The poor were always with us, but billionaire businessmen and a huge middle class were not. They constitute a historical novelty for India . A more empathetic view with compelling stories and statistics, delineating the depredation of the elite and the suffering of the people, is brought home in a new book which demonstrates that the economy may be in good statistical health, but it is by no means in good social or ecological health. Unravelling the social consequences of the growth story, the authors point out that the footprint of the wealthiest Indians is 330 times that of the poorest 40 per cent; and that with each new Special Economic Zone, India lose the capacity to feed 50, 000 to 1,00,000 people each year. * [Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari, Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India ( New Delhi : Penguin, 2012).] Two outstanding studies of existing data on caste and occupation and standard of living of caste groups Blocked by Caste (2010) and The Grammar of Caste (2011)contradict the elitist claims and affirm the persistence of economicsand discriminationof caste. * [Sukhdeo Thorat and Katherine Newman, eds.,Blocked by Caste: Economic Discrimination in Modern India ( New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 2010); Ashwini Deshpande, The Grammar of Caste: Economic Discrimination in Contemporary India ( New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 2011).] As the author of The Grammar of Caste puts it, [D]ata point more towards continuation of traditional hierarchies rather than towards their dissolution, with upper castes at the top, Scheduled Castes-Scheduled Tribes at the bottom, and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) somewhere in between What is very revealing is that lipservice to merit notwithstanding, contemporary, formal, urban sector labour markets show a deep awareness of caste, religious, gender, and class cleavages, and that discrimination is very much a modern sector phenomenon, perpetuated in the present. So it is neither a thing of the

past nor confined only to the rural areas. * [ Ashwini Deshpande, The Grammar of Caste , pp. xiv-xv.] Another offbeat scholar who has studied caste seriously makes a point which helps us better grasp why things are as they are: There can be no denying that for centuries they [dalits and other lowered castes] have been at the receiving end of all communicationinformation (nay, disinformation), sermons, commands and the like, and compelled into a position of powerlessness. Not surprisingly, the legacy [of caste and domination] persists. * [Debi Chatterjee, Ideas and Movements Against Caste in India ( Delhi : Abhijeet Publications, 2010), p. 285.] democracy in India is only top dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic. He tried hard to integrate progressive elements of social justice into the Constitution, but also underlined that rights are protected not by law but by the social and moral conscience of society. He strove to make the nationalleadership recognise that caste and brahmanism were structural and ideological obstruction to the idea of democracy, and that without eliminating them, India could never become a society where freedom and equality were available to everyone. But the national pundits colluded to ignore caste as far as possible. Only the question of untouchability was debated as its presence was too glaring and Ambedkar too insistent to leave it to the mercy of caste elites. A sociologist has pointed out the official and social-moral ban on public discussion of caste in the decades after Independence , but the ruling castes moulded the state apparatus and body politic in such a way that caste was reinvented as a modern institution capable of reproducing caste inequalities. * [Satish Deshpande,Contemporary India : A Sociological View ( New Delhi : Penguin, 2004).] The investment priorities of the successive Five Years Plans under Nehru and his successors were enormously biased in favour of upper caste-class sections of society. * [N K Sarkar, Social Structure and Development Strategy in Asia (New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1978), p. 25.] Hidden behind the innocuous labels of traditional Hinduism or modern secularism, the new brahmanism was equated with nationalism and the shaper of Indian unity, with the corollary to pigeonhole the majority

dalits, adivasis, OBCs, Muslims, Sikhs, and other ethnic-religious categories into different categories of minorities. It is notable that upper castes, barely 15 per cent of the population, have never presented themselves as a minority. Also, this groupwhich controls different levers of power and possess the lion's share of country's wealth remains the most elusive social group in modern India in statistical terms. * [Satish Deshpande, Contemporary India , p. 110.] Though the castes are increasingly getting separated from their former assigned tasks, the link between privilege and high caste status remains strong. And so is low caste status and assignment of most laborious and non-intellectual tasks. Politics is the only arena where traditionally subjugated social groups are far better represented, and this reflects in the mounting anger of the privileged groups towards parliamentary politics and politicians. Arithmetic of elections and dependence of parties and politicians on corporate houses for fighting elections turn them into worst kind of power players. The fact is, the locus of power has decidedly shifted from Parliament to the corporate towers. This is the fundamental debasement of democracy, not the deepening of democracy, as political pundits wax eloquent to keep the excluded multitude in good humour. They are bound up with the corporate economics and politics to plunder the people and the earth under the banner of globalisation. They have rendered democracy hollow: Modern democracies have been around for long enough for neo-liberal capitalists to learn how to subvert them. They have mastered the technique of infiltrating the instruments of democracythe independent judiciary, the free press, the parliamentand moulding them to their purpose. The project of corporate globalisation has cracked the code. Free elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder. * [Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire ( Massachusetts : South End Press, 2004), p. 3.]

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